The affine rank minimization problem consists of finding a matrix of minimum rank that satisfies a given system of linear equality constraints. Such problems have appeared in the literature of a diverse set of fields including system identification and control, Euclidean embedding, and collaborative filtering. Although specific instances can often be solved with specialized algorithms, the general affine rank minimization problem is NP-hard, because it contains vector cardinality minimization as a special case. In this paper, we show that if a certain restricted isometry property holds for the linear transformation defining the constraints, the minimum rank solution can be recovered by solving a convex optimization problem, namely the minimization of the nuclear norm over the given affine space. We present several random ensembles of equations where the restricted isometry property holds with overwhelming probability, provided the codimension of the subspace is sufficiently large. The techniques used in our analysis have strong parallels in the compressed sensing framework. We discuss how affine rank minimization generalizes this pre-existing concept and outline a dictionary relating concepts from cardinality minimization to those of rank minimization. We also discuss several algorithmic approaches to solving the norm minimization relaxations, and illustrate our results with numerical examples.

It is now well understood that (1) it is possible to reconstruct sparse signals exactly from what appear to be highly incomplete sets of linear measurements and (2) that this can be done by constrained ℓ1 minimization. In this paper, we study a novel method for sparse signal recovery that in many situations outperforms ℓ1 minimization in the sense that substantially fewer measurements are needed for exact recovery. The algorithm consists of solving a sequence of weighted ℓ1-minimization problems where the weights used for the next iteration are computed from the value of the current solution. We present a series of experiments demonstrating the remarkable performance and broad applicability of this algorithm in the areas of sparse signal recovery, statistical estimation, error correction and image processing. Interestingly, superior gains are also achieved when our method is applied to recover signals with assumed near-sparsity in overcomplete representations—not by reweighting the ℓ1 norm of the coefficient sequence as is common, but by reweighting the ℓ1 norm of the transformed object. An immediate consequence is the possibility of highly efficient data acquisition protocols by improving on a technique known as compressed sensing.

In this paper we study robust convex quadratically constrained programs, a subset of the class of robust convex programs introduced by Ben-Tal and Nemirovski [4]. Unlike [4], our focus in this paper is to identify uncertainty structures that allow the corresponding robust quadratically constrained programs to be reformulated as second-order cone programs. We propose three classes of uncertainty sets that satisfy this criterion and present examples where these classes of uncertainty sets are natural. 1 Problem formulation A generic quadratically constrained program (QCP) is defined as follows.

In this we paper we study techniques for generating valid convex constraints for mixed 0-1 conic programs. We show that many of the techniques developed for generating linear cuts for mixed 0-1 linear programs, such as the Gomory cuts, the lift-and-project cuts, and cuts from other hierarchies of tighter relaxations, extend in a straightforward manner to mixed 0-1 conic programs. We also show that simple extensions of these techniques lead to methods for generating convex quadratic cuts. Gomory cuts for mixed 0-1 conic programs have interesting implications for comparing the semidefinite programming and the linear programming relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems, e.g. we show that all the subtour elimination inequalities for the traveling salesman problem are rank-1 Gomory cuts with respect to a single semidefinite constraint. We also include results from our preliminary computational experiments with these cuts.

Classical formulations of the portfolio optimization problem, such as mean-variance or Value-at-Risk (VaR) approaches, can result in a portfolio extremely sensitive to errors in the data, such as mean and covariance matrix of the returns. In this paper we propose a way to alleviate this problem in a tractable manner. We assume that the distribution of returns is partially known, in the sense that only bounds on the mean and covariance matrix are available. We define the worst-case Value-at-Risk as the largest VaR attainable, given the partial information on the returns ’ distribution. We consider the problem of computing and optimizing the worst-case VaR, and we show that these problems can be cast as semidefinite programs. We extend our approach to various other partial information on the distribution, including uncertainty in factor models, support constraints, and relative entropy information.

We consider the problem of estimating a pattern of faults, represented as a binary vector, from a set of measurements. The measurements can be noise corrupted real values, or quantized versions of noise corrupted signals, including even 1-bit (sign) measurements. Maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation of the fault pattern leads to a difficult combinatorial optimization problem, so we propose a variation in which an approximate maximum a posteriori probability estimate is found instead, by solving a convex relaxation of the original problem, followed by rounding and simple local optimization. Our method is extremely efficient, and scales to very large problems, involving thousands (or more) possible faults and measurements. Using synthetic examples, we show that the method performs extremely well, both in identifying the true fault pattern, and in identifying an ambiguity group, i.e., a set of alternate fault patterns that explain the observed measurements almost as well as our estimate. 1

We consider the problem of estimating a sparse signal from a set of quantized, Gaussian noise corrupted measurements, where each measurement corresponds to an interval of values. We give two methods for (approximately) solving this problem, each based on minimizing a differentiable convex function plus an regularization term. Using a first order method developed by Hale et al, we demonstrate the performance of the methods through numerical simulation. We find that, using these methods, compressed sensing can be carried out even when the quantization is very coarse, e.g., 1 or 2 bits per measurement.

This paper develops a linear programming based branch-and-bound algorithm for mixed in-teger conic quadratic programs. The algorithm is based on a higher dimensional or lifted polyhedral relaxation of conic quadratic constraints introduced by Ben-Tal and Nemirovski. The algorithm is different from other linear programming based branch-and-bound algo-rithms for mixed integer nonlinear programs in that, it is not based on cuts from gradient inequalities and it sometimes branches on integer feasible solutions. The algorithm is tested on a series of portfolio optimization problems. It is shown that it significantly outperforms commercial and open source solvers based on both linear and nonlinear relaxations. Key words: nonlinear integer programming; branch and bound; portfolio optimization History: February 2007. 1.

The problem of estimating underlying trends in time series data arises in a variety of disciplines. In this paper we propose a variation on Hodrick-Prescott (H-P) filtering, a widely used method for trend estimation. The proposed ℓ1 trend filtering method substitutes a sum of absolute values (i.e., an ℓ1-norm) for the sum of squares used in H-P filtering to penalize variations in the estimated trend. The ℓ1 trend filtering method produces trend estimates that are piecewise linear, and therefore is well suited to analyzing time series with an underlying piecewise linear trend. The kinks, knots, or changes in slope, of the estimated trend can be interpreted as abrupt changes or events in the underlying dynamics of the time series. Using specialized interior-point methods, ℓ1 trend filtering can be carried out with not much more effort than H-P filtering; in particular, the number of arithmetic operations required grows linearly with the number of data points. We describe the method and some of its basic properties, and give some illustrative examples. We show how the method is related to ℓ1 regularization based methods in sparse signal recovery and feature selection, and list some extensions of the basic method.

Gene regulatory networks capture interactions between genes and other cell substances, resulting in various models for the fundamental biological process of transcription and trans-lation. The expression levels of the genes are typically measured as mRNA concentration in micro-array experiments. In a so called genetic perturbation experiment, small pertur-bations are applied to equilibrium states and the resulting changes in expression activity are measured. One of the most important problems in systems biology is to use these data to identify the interaction pattern between genes in a regulatory network, especially in a large scale network. In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm for identifying the smallest genetic network that explains genetic perturbation experimental data. By construction, our identification algorithm is able to incorporate and respect any a priori knowledge known about the network structure. A priori biological knowledge is typically qualitative, encoding whether one gene affects another gene or not, or whether the effect is positive or negative. Our method is based on a convex programming relaxation of the combinatorially hard problem of L0 minimization, so it can efficiently handle large scale problems. We apply the proposed method to the identification of a subnetwork of the SOS pathway in Escherichia coli, the segmentation polarity network in Drosophila melanogaster, and a larger artificial network for measuring the performance of the method. In all cases, we show that our method performs better than prior methods.